How Donald Trump Is Expanding His Authority While Shrinking the Government

Not long ago, I was reading the newsletter TheRighting, for which the journalist Howard Polskin combs through the right-wing mediasphere so you don’t have to, when a back-to-back pair of links jumped out at me. The first, from Townhall, announced that it was “Time for Trump’s DOJ and FBI to Deal the Pain.” Republicans “control federal law enforcement right now,” an excerpt pulled out by Polskin read. “That means we get to set the agenda, and we need to ruthlessly and brutally use the law to defeat our enemies’ outrageous and disgraceful attacks upon patriotic Americans.” The second, from The American Spectator, focussed on the role that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX played in bringing home astronauts who had been stranded on the International Space Station, arguing that the supposed rescue reinforced the earthly premise of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or doge: that the government is riddled with waste and other actors can perform its functions better. “If the private sector can recover astronauts,” the subheading read, “it can do anything.”

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Moves that might appear to shrink or to grow the government, however, are not always as contradictory as they seem. Oren Cass, a prominent policy commentator who serves as the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me that “the simple small-government-versus-big-government dichotomy that dictated most of our political fights in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands isn’t the right axis on which to understand a lot of the conflicts and a lot of the opportunities” of this moment. In part, he is right; we are in the midst of a political realignment that muddies old dichotomies. But evaluating exactly how government is getting both smaller and bigger under Trump 2.0—and, in some ways, getting bigger by getting smaller—is a revealing lens through which to view where this Administration, the country, and, perhaps, our broader political world may be headed.